The UX agency is the one that puts your final product or service into the hands of users. By ensuring that they have a positive experience, you can increase revenue and achieve better results. However, working with an agency means you must provide them with all the information they need to provide quality service to you and your business.
You also have to carefully make your pick, as several top design agencies are out there. To help you out, here are six must-ask questions before hiring a user experience design agency.
What is their design process?
A UX design process is a set of activities performed in a specific order. It differs for each project and agency, but it typically covers some or all of the following steps:
- Discovery (understanding who you are talking to and what they need from you)
- Research (determining requirements and context)
- Ideation (creating multiple solutions based on insights from research)
- Prototyping (a quick-and-dirty iteration loop where they build something tangible for feedback from clients)
The ultimate goal of the design process is to create solutions that solve problems for people and drive value for the business. Ultimately, their process must key into your work values and drive at the same goals you wish to attain.
What else do they offer?
Adding the best UX Company can be a valuable resource for your business, but there are others you should use. It is essential to consider if they can help you achieve other goals besides improving user experience.
Suppose they offer complementary services, such as user research or content strategy; this can be beneficial for improving the overall quality of your product or service. Successful completion of your project with them should mean something other than the journey ending there. Instead, it should encourage you to continue working together on long-term goals and strategies for growth to meet those goals.
Do they have previous experience in your industry?
When you find a design agency that fits your needs, you must ask them if they have previous experience in your industry. This will help you determine if they know how to best approach the problem and how much research may need to be done before starting the project.
If the agency says no or has never worked on projects like yours before, don’t panic. It doesn’t mean that the UX Company can’t provide any value; it just means that there might be an initial learning curve when working together.
Also, ask whether or not they have worked with any of your competitors before. If the answer is positive, you must understand how they handled this situation and how the client reacted.
Similarly, it’s also essential to know if they are still in a contract with your competitors. Why? If your pick of the best UX Company still provides growth services to a direct competitor, there might be a clash of interest. In such instances, it’s best to drop them and search for a worthy replacement.
What is their customer support like?
Let’s face it, we all want to choose a company that will be there for us. Customer support is more than simply offering an email address or phone number for clients to contact during business hours. However, these are indeed good starting points. It should also include how they handle positive and negative client feedback. Additionally, ask them how they take complaints from customers who aren’t happy with their services.
Difference of opinion is another aspect you want to look at critically. You want to know if your agency will stand up for its work if there is an issue. If your workplace can explain the decision process based on your conversation, there’s a great chance of everyone arriving at a common goal. The best UX companies will be able to explain why one solution worked better than another while acknowledging that it could have been better.
Where have they worked?
One way to determine whether a top design agency is suitable for your project is to ask for their portfolio. A good portfolio shows off a company’s expertise and experience in one place, so it makes sense that you would want to review it before making any final decisions.
You should look at what kinds of projects they have worked on and what companies they have worked with. This gives you an idea about their processes when working on these projects.
The next step is talking to previous customers and seeing if there are any examples of results achieved through UX strategy implementation by the agency. If this could happen, take advantage of this opportunity. The more information you gather when evaluating an agency’s suitability, the better your chances are at finding one that will help achieve success with your project.
What are their limitations?
Top design agencies are more than just a one-size-fits-all solution. Different UX agencies will be better suited to your project depending on your needs and the required services. It would help if you always took time to research the limitations of any agency before making a hiring decision.
Ask each agency what their limitations are and make sure they’re compatible with yours:
- Are they more focused on design or research?
- How do they work with other parts of the product development process (e.g., marketing)?
- Are there certain things that you need to handle yourself because it’s simply not possible for an external agency (e.g., data science)?
Another question is whether any part of the design process will be outsourced. Outsourcing has many benefits, but it can compromise the quality of your experience and even lead to problems such as communication breakdown.
For example, if you’re working with a design agency that outsources certain parts of their process, there needs to be a guarantee that those tasks will be done by someone trained in UX best practices. If this happens, you could end up with something that looks great but needs to work better within your product strategy.
Conclusion
There’s much more to consider regarding user experience design than hiring an agency. You need to ensure that you know what you’re getting into and have clear expectations for the work they will do on your behalf. You should also be aware of any potential limitations that could hinder the success of your project before signing anything off or granting access to sensitive data.